On Thu, 2011-12-08 at 12:20 +0100, SYSTEMS Oliver Osburg wrote: > I often reconfigure my clients, too. Config Files change, and I also > would appreciate a way to "automatically" create FAI configs from a > running Debian Machine. But in a way, this violates the FAI philosophy > "Do all configurations on the server".
I would recommend looking at system configuration tools, such as cfengine and puppet (possibly there are others which I am not aware of). We use cfengine version 2 (version 3 is different in highly incompatible ways, so you better pick one and stick with it). All, even the tiniest differences between a system "as installed" and the system "as configured" are recorded in the cfengine (or puppet, if you prefer that tool) configuration files. The configuration trees themselves are kept in a versioning system (we use Subversion here). It seems like a huge effort to set up initially (and it is), but the benefits will outweigh the initial cost by many times in the future. During the last stages of FAI installation, the configuration is obtained from the versioning system and applied with the cfengine. Among the configurations are instructions for cfengine itself to keep the machine up-to-date in the future. All future changes in configuration are done in the instructions to cfengine. Thus they get applied in similar manner both to existing systems, as well as new ones when those will be installed in the future. One extra benefit of keeping the configuration in Subversion is the possibility to merge changes to configuration files made by the OS vendor(s) (Debian in our case). This way I never need to worry about losing changes at upgrades. We use somewhat customized FAI softupdates to keep package lists on hosts in sync, but I believe that could be automated with the configuration tools as well. Finally, read http://www.infrastructures.org/ . I think this is the single most useful site which has influenced the way I look at systems management, even though they never mention FAI or cfengine, and the site has not been updated for years. -- Toomas Tamm e-mail: tt-fai (at) kky.ttu.ee Chair of Inorganic Chemistry voice: INT+372-620-2810 Tallinn University of Technology fax: INT+372-620-2828 Ehitajate tee 5, EE-19086 Tallinn, Estonia http://www.kk.ttu.ee/toomas/
